Carbon is a commonly used implant species. It can be implanted alone for carbon doping. Alternatively carbon and one or more other species are used to form a heterogeneous doping. In this case the carbon ion is called a co-implant for the other species, generally a pre-amorphization implant (PAI) species such as Germanium, Phosphorous or Boron. The carbon is positioned between a shallow dopant and end-of-range (EOR) damage caused by the PAI species. The carbon acting as a substituent here will block some interstitials coming back from EOR during the annealing step. It would then avoid transient enhanced diffusion (TED) or boron interstitial cluster formation (BIC). Carbon range also often overlaps with the PAI species and contributes to PAI by itself. Another application of carbon doping is to create compressive strain. In a source/drain in a transistor device created from SIC, carbon implantation will cause tensile strain in the channel. This stress is beneficial for NMOS for instance.
Carbon implantation is challenging. It can be done by epitaxial growth or high dose implant however this can cause amorphization of the silicon re-grown.
Many molecules and techniques have been used for carbon implant. For instance, Hatem, et al. (US 20090200494 A1, Varian) describes the use of a cold implantation process. They describe a low temperature process using gases such as methane, ethane, propane, bibenzyl, butane and pyrene (C16H10) or possible using molecular carbon in combination with diborane, pentaborane, carborane, octaborane, decaborane, or octadecaborane.
Jagannathan et al. (US2002160587A1, IBM) described the doping of Si or SiGe using boron or carbon for heterojunction bipolar transistors (HTB). The carbon containing gas is C2H4.
Jacobson et al. (US2008299749A1) described a method for cluster ion implantation for defect engineering. The method consists of implanting using an ion beam formed from ionized molecules. In the method, molecular cluster dopant ions are implanted into a substrate with or without a co-implant of non-dopant cluster ion (carbon cluster ion for instance). The dopant ion is implanted into the amorphous layer created by the co-implant in order to reduce defects in the crystalline structure (and reducing the leakage current thus improving the performances of the semiconductor junctions). The use of CnH+ type molecules is generally described and more specifically the use of C16H10 solid and not volatile with a high temperature melting point) and C7H7.
Suitable techniques that can be used for carbon implantation include standard ion beam (beamline), plasma doping, or pulsed plasma doping (P2LAD), plasma Immersion Ion Implantation (PI3), including the many related variants of these techniques known in the art.